


love in the midst of chaos, calm in the heat of war, showed with amazing grace what love was for

by houselannister



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: F/M, Pre-Series
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-15
Updated: 2013-05-15
Packaged: 2017-12-11 21:34:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,817
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/803494
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/houselannister/pseuds/houselannister
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The twins deal with Joanna's death.</p>
<p>{"What do I get?" she remembered asking.}</p>
<p>“You can’t hide from me,” she said. Her voice was softer, and in the silence that followed Jaime noticed that Joanna had stopped screaming. He felt glad, for only a moment, and then a shiver ran through him, and he might have been crazy but he could have sworn he’d seen Cersei’s eyes widen for a moment too, as if she’d felt it too.</p>
            </blockquote>





	love in the midst of chaos, calm in the heat of war, showed with amazing grace what love was for

Casterly Rock had never been warm, not truly. Its proximity to the sea did wonders for the temperature on the outside of the walls, but on the inside the stone kept the heat at bay. Jaime Lannister often wondered how his lady mother managed breezing past the corridors in nothing but thin velvet, with her hair up tight and her long neck uncovered. He decided perhaps that was why she had fallen ill, in the first place. Her belly had grown heavy with the child she was carrying, but Jaime knew his brother would never hurt their mother: he was a Lannister, after all, he was like him. _Yes_ , he had told himself when he’d heard Joanna’s thunderous screaming from the birthing chambers, _it must have been the cold_.

“He is hurting her,” Cersei’s voice was strong enough to be heard over her mother’s cries, and Jaime looked at her like he would have looked at Joanna. She was golden, like their mother, and her green eyes sparkled in the flickering light of the hundred candles in the great hall. The old nurse was sitting beside them, a needle in her hand, sewing mindlessly. Once or twice Jaime had seen her worried stare whenever she glanced at the entrance, where Joanna’s voice could be heard the loudest. He looked at Cersei, instead, because his twin’s anger he could hold on to: pain, on the other hand, was something Jaime Lannister didn’t know, nor did he _mean_ to know that night.

“He is not,” he replied stubbornly, gripping the tiny wooden soldier tight in his palm and sliding it across the table until it knocked down the wooden dragon on the other side. Knight and dragon tumbled across the surface and over the edge, hitting the stone beneath the benches. His mother screamed again, and Jaime stood up angrily, jumping over the table, careless of the old woman’s reprimanding. “He is our brother. He is going to be like me. He would never hurt Mother.”

“Well he is hurting her now,” Cersei insisted, standing up and following him across the hall towards the entrance. The corridor was eerily quiet, their footsteps echoing around them, and the old nurse’s pleas to get back to the main hall were ignored by the little lord and lady. Instead, Jaime walked faster: Cersei managed to keep up with him, picking up her skirts and trying to pull at his sleeve.

“Do something,” she kept saying, commanding, adamant, every word a tug at his clothes. “I said _do something_!”

 Jaime tried to shrug her off, block her words out, but Joanna’s screams were louder, and he could not block _those_ out.

“Jaime,” Cersei hissed again, but he ignored her.

Truthfully, he didn’t know where he was going, nor what he would do. In his dreams, Jaime Lannister wanted to be a valiant knight, but in his eight year old’s heart he wished really hard for his mother to stop screaming, and for his sister to stop asking him to do something he could not do. _I want to help her_ , he thought, and he began running, _and_ _I want to help you, sister_. He glanced over his shoulder only to see Cersei running after him, still angry and still hopelessly clinging to the thought that he might stop their mother’s pain. He could see it in her eyes. He could feel it radiating from every inch of her, the need for him to be the knight he was always meant to become.

He stopped, slipping behind a statue and into a small opening, crouching down to push a heavy tapestry aside. He knew Casterly Rock inside out, like the tilt of his short sword. He crawled up a tunnel, his knees scraping against the stone, and his hands bloody from the pace. He hissed when he hit a pointy rock that tore the skin of his right hand. There was no time to cry, however – Jaime Lannister did not cry. He kept crawling in the darkness, slower now that he knew he was almost there; Cersei had not followed him behind the tapestry, he could not feel her breathing behind him, and her nagging had stopped. He halted for a moment when he reached the spot where he knew the opening in the wall would be. Jaime took a deep breath and snapped his eyes shut when his mother’s cry echoed all the way up the tunnel, more haunting in the dark than it had been by candlelight. On his way through the opening, he lost his footing and tumbled backwards, flat on his back. Green eyes he knew too well stared back at him, and he could do nothing but lie there, in the armory, on his back, looking up at his sister.

“You can’t hide from me,” she said. Her voice was softer, and in the silence that followed Jaime noticed that Joanna had stopped screaming. He felt glad, for only a moment, and then a shiver ran through him, and he might have been crazy but he could have sworn he’d seen Cersei’s eyes widen for a moment too, as if she’d felt it too.

Casterly Rock had never been warm, but in that moment it felt just a bit colder. When Cersei offered him her hand to help him up, Jaime noticed it was warmer than usual.

 

*

 

Joanna Lannister’s eyes closed some three hours after the sun had set, never to open again. The Lannister guards that patrolled the castle and the grounds that surrounded it spoke of a monster that had murdered the Lady of Casterly Rock, a small devil that had crawled out of her womb with twisted limbs and a deformed head, a punishment of the Sevens that had been meant for the mighty Tywin Lannister. He’d risen too high, too close to the sun perhaps, and the Stranger had sent down his messenger in the form of a vile creature born of evil and maliciousness. They also spoke of Tywin Lannister’s grief, how he had not left his Lady’s side for two whole nights, and how not even the Silent Sisters had been allowed to touch the golden corpse.

There was a new Lady in Casterly Rock and she was eight years old, as golden as her mother. There had been authority in Joanna Lannister, and anyone who’d seen the new little Lady knew there was just as much in there. But no one was under her spell more than her twin brother. The little lord followed his sister for two days straight, and whenever she turned a corner one was bound to see him close behind, eyes stern, his right hand clenched tightly around the hilt of his toy sword. Everyone knew soon enough, it would be replaced with a steel one.

_A Queen with her knight_ , the Lannister guards whispered. _Here comes a Queen with her knight_. Rumors of a royal wedding were kept secret, but insisting, pressing, they ran amongst the guards like children at play, unable to be kept at bay. Cersei Lannister was already all that a Queen should be: the only thing that she lacked was a crown and the young Targaryen heir at her side. She wore a golden tiara instead, and it was her brother that walked beside her, watching her every movement. Two days, and Casterly Rock was already different. Joanna Lannister had left the world of the living to be replaced by a miniature of herself, one that the Lannister guards feared more than they’d ever feared the Mother.

No one ever saw the children cry for Joanna’s passing. But they did.

 

*

 

Jaime knew his sister was angrier than she’d been the day of their mother’s passing; it was easier to see the anger than it was to see the grief, but she showed him, and him alone, how truly broken her heart was. To anyone else, his sister was a rock, who kept her head held high and waltzed across halls and corridors with Joanna’s elegance and Tywin’s determination . When the doors were closed, and they were alone in Cersei’s bedroom, he saw the mask slip.  Her eyes would water, and it was all he could do to look at her and be silent, knowing he could not comfort her because she  maybe “would not be in need of it”. For three days he waited for her to fall asleep, sitting on the hard stone floor by the side of her bed, holding her hand only when her handmaids had been dismissed for the night.

The third day, he still didn’t leave. He stayed the whole night until his buttocks began aching; he let go of Cersei’s hand only to crawl onto her bed and  lay down beside her. Her breathing was even and she was fast asleep, but as he glanced at her he could see the frown that wrinkled her brow, as if she’d fallen asleep heavy with scary images. He wondered, briefly, if those were the same images that haunted him at night: his mother’s bed empty, her chair pulled from the dinner table, or worse, occupied by someone else. And then there was his little brother to think of: they had not let him and Cersei see the child, but whispers were louder than the people around the castle thought them to be; he knew what his brother was, he knew what they were saying in Lannisport. _A monster, sent to punish Tywin Lannister_. Jaime did not understand why his father would need punishment, if not for being the most powerful man in the Seven Kingdoms. _More powerful than the King_ , he often found himself thinking. Perhaps it had been the king who had killed his lady mother. Perhaps the king had been jealous. (It couldn’t have been his brother. He refused to believe that. Cersei disagreed, but Cersei had hated the little one before he had even seen the light.)

It had been Maester Creylen who had told Jaime and Cersei that their mother had fallen asleep and that this time she would not wake up. The old man had tried to cover the truth with sweet lies of how Joanna’s soul had been called to the Mother, how she had been so gentle and loving that the Sevens had wanted her to dine with them in the Heavens. But Cersei had pushed the old man, and she had called him a liar; Jaime had held her back, tried to keep her from lashing out at the old Maester once more, and when he couldn’t keep her still he’d hugged her, lifted her up as she kicked the air and screamed at him too, and he had dragged her away. He was her knight, and he had to protect her, even from herself. He’d locked her in her room, and he had stood vigil outside the door for a whole day, until the screaming had subsided and the angry fists had stopped beating the wooden door. He’d opened the door then, let her out, and she’d looked at him. The girl he’d locked inside (the screaming child, the mourning daughter, the angry little girl) had gone, and before him stood his sister, and not a tear was shed for the following days. She never thanked him for doing that, for keeping her rage and her tears from people’s scrutiny; he knew, however, that she would understand, eventually.

That night, he felt a wetness on his cheeks, and it was a surprise to realize that he wasn’t really crying for his mother as much as he was crying for his sister. He would miss Joanna, but Cersei would miss her more. Their mother’s absence would be difficult to deal with, but if he had to wager on who would feel it the most, he knew his sister would have the worst of it. When he wiped the tear with the silk sleeve, he drew a shaky breath: he was eight years old, and perhaps he could cry just this once. For his mother and for his sister, and for what life would be from now on. He would cry for his little brother, who was not what he had hoped he would be. For his father, who had lost the woman that made him smile. (Cersei made Jaime smile. He tried to imagine losing her, but it became so hard to breathe that he had to push the thought aside immediately and inch closer, just so he could hear her breathing, feel it against his skin, to assure him she was there, and alive, and he wouldn’t let anyone take her from him, not when she was the half that made him whole.) He grabbed her hand then, harsh, careless of the chance he might wake her up: he gripped it tight until his fingers hurt. He knew she was awake then, because she gripped his hand just as fiercely, and told him she would never leave him and he would never leave her.

 

*

 

Jaime had heard stories, unwillingly read the books, studied his lessons: he knew about the Seven Kingdoms, and he knew about all the families that inhabited them. The Starks in the North, the Martells in the South, the Arryns in the East: he knew their words (sometimes he forgot them and asked Cersei to whisper them instead) and he knew their traditions and rites. Casterly Rock rose in the Westerlands, far away from both North, East and South, a kingdom in itself: they had traditions of their own, and those Jaime knew well because he had lived through each and every one of them. How a noble girl’s first flowering was paraded proudly, how the birth of a first son was a sacred day for all the people in the kingdom, how a victory in battle was celebrated with a great feast in the halls of the Rock, where the corpses of the enemy were kept in golden cages to be thrown in the sea beneath the castle.

The great Hall of Heroes was the most majestic hall of the main castle; deep in the bowels of the Rock, a long ladder that went down and down and down for days led to a stony cave; the water surrounded the place, shining bright blues and greens against the ceiling, sending up a glistening wetness across the hard walls. Above the water, a small bridge with golden railings crossed the cave; it halted before a door, tall and golden as well, guarded day and night.

When they were young, Cersei and Jaime tried to descend all the way to the Hall of Heroes, but had always been caught before they could reach the bridge. Guards would run after them, grab them by the arms and all but drag them upstairs back to the castle. Little did their shrieking do, even less their threats of telling their lord Father about it.

“Lord Tywin doesn’t want the pair of you scurrying off down here,” the guards were accustomed to replying. And indeed, Tywin had never as much as flinched when Cersei lamented the manhandling of the Lannister guardsmen: he would turn his back on them and send them away, Cersei back to her rooms, Jaime back to the yard where he was to practice with his swords.

They were barely six, but they knew what the Hall of Heroes was, and even though they had never seen it, the tales of grandeur preceded it. They told of a room whose ceiling was as tall as the sky and as golden as the sun, a room where the sun itself had been trapped by Lann the Clever when he had stolen its rays from it. And when the sun had seen fit to escape, it had done so with an explosion that had risen all seas and the ground with them, and that the Rock had been generated from that one enormous explosion.

Those were legends, and Jaime did not believe the likes of them. He thought them stories for the children of sailors down in Lannisport, a believable legend that would tell of the Lannisters’ wonderful birth. Jaime knew, instead, that the Casterlys had been in the Rock for years before Lann the Clever had conquered it with nothing but his wit. For Jaime, that was as good a story as the one with the sun and the explosion. But his ancestors would rather pride themselves with a story of strength rather than a story of wits, and that made sense to Jaime Lannister: strength was what made a man such. Wits were not a good enough weapons against swords and horses and arrows. He wanted to be strong --he didn’t care for being witty.

In Casterly Rock one was to wait for three days and three nights before a corpse was allowed into the Hall of Heroes, supposedly to allow all malicious actions and thoughts to leave the body so that it was pure upon burial. Three days and three nights after his mother’s death, Jaime Lannister watched as something heavy and wrapped in a crimson cloak, was carried out of his mother’s chambers. His sister stood besidehim and they watched in  silence until Cersei took a single step forward, and called out for her, for Joanna.

“Mother,” she whispered, to something Jaime knew would not answer. Their mother was not there, not anymore, but Cersei seemed to cling to it the moment she saw the cloak. His sister had been strong for too long, and he watched as her green eyes widened.

“Let’s switch,” she whispered instead.

He was confused for a moment, but then he understood.

 

*

 

It had been more enjoyable to wear Cersei’s clothes when he was younger. The silk and velvet were funny, nice to touch, and the clothes had been noticeably less embellished and heavy. Those had been a child’s clothes back then, meant to play and to dance. But as he donned Cersei’s black gown, it felt heavy with the weight of the gems on its breast and the long skirts were messing with his legs, making him stumble every time he would try and take a step. Cersei stood behind him, brushing his hair until it was straighter, and it looked longer than it usually was: like hers. In the opaque reflection, he could see how more comfortable his sister was in his clothes instead. She wore his best white blouse, with a black vest embroidered with fine golden threads on the sides; his breeches looked better on her than they did on him, as her legs were slender in a way his weren’t. Her hair was tousled -- it curled and knotted in spots from the way she had run her hands through it, to make it more resembling to his. It took that little: their features did all the rest.

Once again, as he stared into the mirror, at his and Cersei’s reflections, he couldn’t help but smirk a little at how uncanny the resemblance was, careful not to be seen by Cersei (and the Gods, too, for  smiling on his mother’s burial day would be frowned upon); he shrugged Cersei’s hands off and turned around, fidgeting with the skirts and kicking the many layers of veils underneath the velvet, trying to find a way to walk in that glorious mess. Cersei slapped his hands away and picked up his skirt on the sides, showing him how to do it. _She is better at this, but_ _she couldn’t wield a sword the way I do_ , he told himself when he felt his cheeks reddening with embarrassment.

“You will leave me as well.”

Jaime’s eyes shot up, taken aback by how strong his sister’s voice had sounded when she’d said that. In her eyes he could see a pool of red anger and restless frustrations, and he felt like grabbing her shoulders then, or slapping her. (It was a moment, and he felt ashamed of himself. He’d seen men hitting women, but Cersei was not like them. Cersei was his sister, the better part of him, and he the better part of her. How could he ever hurt her? He was her knight now, more so than he’d ever been. He had been Joanna’s knight too, but he hadn’t been able to save her. Perhaps he could save Cersei. He would, he decided then and there. He would do for her what he hadn’t been able to do for their mother. She was the only thing he had left.)

“Why would I?” he asked, frowning like the child he sometimes forgot he was. Both their cheeks were chubby, and their lips as pink as the petals of a summer rose.

“Because you will be a knight,” was the simple reply, and Jaime could see how truthful that was. Yes, one day he would be a knight. He would be the greatest knight the Seven Kingdoms had ever seen, much brighter and greater than Ser Arthur Dayne. Where did that leave his sister? She was made to be Queen. But before he could ask, his sister seemed to read his thoughts. (It was a common occurrence.) “I will be married to whomever our lord Father sees fit -- I will be a lord’s lady. And I will never see you again.”

She wasn’t crying, nor screaming, but Jaime could have sworn the very bowels of the Rock had trembled when those words had been spoken. Like the Rock itself couldn’t accept the idea, like the stone they were standing on was weeping for them and for the shame of such a perfect creature being severed, torn apart.

“I’ll be a knight,” Jaime repeated, nodding, and then he shrugged, feeling small in his body. “But you will be Queen. I could be _your_ knight.” Jaime didn’t care for the King – nor did his father – and he did not care for the prince. But to be his sister’s knight, to protect her with sword and lance, to be her shield, that seemed to him like the noblest thing to do. “Don’t you want to be Queen?”

That seemed to surprise her almost as much as she had surprised him at first. Had she truly thought he hadn’t heard those rumors? That he was blind and deaf to what every person in the Rock whispered upon their passing? The thought of Rhaegar Targaryen was not one that made his rest peaceful; if a dragon were to take his sister away from him, how could he ever sleep again? How could he ever breathe, without her in the same room, the same castle? _A lord’s lady_ , she had said. A King’s Queen was what Jaime had heard instead. Children were innocent, or at least they were supposed to be: Jaime couldn’t tell when his innocence had left him, or if it had ever truly been there. He never wished for it back, either. That lack made him stronger, that lack made him man enough to protect his family. He was eight years old and a man already, and his sister was more of a woman than many of the serving wenches that brought him and his father dinner. It was no time for games.

(Had it ever truly been, for Lannisters of their kind?)

“I will be Queen,” Cersei replied, and it was clear her heart accepted no alternatives. “Only when I am, you will not follow me. You will fight brave warriors, and maybe dragons too.” He was about to chime in and tell her that dragons were _extinct_ , he could never do that. But she didn’t give him any opening.

“You will never come back for me. You will forget me. You will marry and you will have children that will look like me, but you will never remember me, even once I am Queen.” It sounded so final that Jaime wanted to reach out for her and tell her no. But instead his feet were stuck and so was the rest of him, his mind as well.

Until she spoke again, after a few moments of silence. “Mother left, why shouldn’t you?”

To see their mother die had created a gap in her that she didn’t think anyone would ever fill again: not because they weren’t capable of doing that, but because if a mother had been so cruel as to leave her daughter, who else could ever love her? Once the one person who was supposed to cherish her had left the world, did that mean she could never be loved again? It was as if Joanna had chosen to go, and Jaime knew that was not the reason; and even though his sister knew as well, some part of her, some dark monster inside her body, was taking up the space their mother had left and replacing all memories with anger and fear and abandonment.

The door opened before Jaime could answer, and Tywin Lannister looked down on his children, severe and just as dark as his daughter, his soul blackened by the same stains that blackened hers. Jaime’s shoulders straightened up the way he was used to, forgetting he was not who he was, not today. He was reminded immediately, however, when Tywin’s eyes fell on his sister instead of him, the way he was accustomed to.

“Let’s go,” he said. Cersei was fast and determined, turning her back on him without a second glance. She walked up to their father and kept her head high, and he could almost see himself walking by Tywin’s side. A woman he recognized as Cersei’s handmaid rushed him out, and he walked behind his sister and his father, watching the two backs and wondering why it was always his father’s back he was pry to when he was in Cersei’s clothes, never his eyes.

 

*

 

At the end of the day the Hall of Heroes was no legend. Perhaps the stories behind its creation were, but the Hall itself was as grand as the sailors in Lannisport thought it to be, and taller than Jaime had imagined it. The solid gold door that had opened before them was thrice as tall as his father, maybe more. Craning his neck, Jaime could hardly see the end of it, and over the threshold everything shone a vivid gold that almost hurt the eyes of the beholder. He had to squint to get accustomed to the shining everywhere, the gold, the rubies, the endless crimson Myrish silk that embraced the tall columns, all the way up to the capitals. Along the walls a countless number of golden statues looked down upon them, faces Jaime knew and remembered from the many paintings up in the castle.

Ancestors, fathers, mothers, sisters.

Lannisters.

Three days was the shortest time, and Jaime was surprised to see that there, amongst all those familiar faces, he could spot one that was most familiar of all: his mother stared at him with golden eyes, golden hair, golden body (she had been golden living, Jaime thought the only difference between that statue and his mother was in the eyes, not green but golden as the rest) and her hands were joined, palms up as if she were waiting for something. Jaime looked around and saw that all the statues had been carved in similar positions, and in their golden hands were urns just as golden. In Joanna’s hands was no urn, but there was one in the hands of the living: Master Creylen, by Tywin’s side, had carried the urn all the way down from the castle.

Cersei stood at his side, looking on, and when he turned to glance in her direction her face resembled the golden statues, his mother’s most of all; but in the light of the many candles, his sister’s profile was the same as his father and Jaime saw himself in her and all the Lannisters that came before them. For a moment that felt like eternity she was everything and everyone and Jaime couldn’t look away, for his sister was the most precious gold in the room. It was Tywin’s voice that shook him out of his awe when he heard his name. “Jaime,” his father said, and Jaime turned around out of instinct; however, it was Cersei who stepped forward, inching closer to her father and looking up at him expectantly.

Master Creylen placed the urn in Tywin’s hands, who in turn placed it on Cersei’s. Then he draped an arm around her shoulders and pushed her forward, at the feet of the statue. “Say goodbye to your mother,” he said, and Jaime heard how his voice had changed from what it had been three days before. There was a more grievous accent, a heavy weight over every syllable. Cersei was too short and a guard stepped up, hoisting her up and letting her tiny arms reach up until she could place the golden urn in its place. When the guard put her back down, Cersei’s legs were trembling – Jaime noticed immediately, and he almost caved in to the urge to run to her and hold her. But it was Tywin who did so, kneeling before Cersei and looking deeply into her eyes, seeing his son instead of his daughter.

“You are the future of House Lannister, my son,” he said. There was no kindness in the way he spoke, but a sense of doom and fate that sent shivers up Jaime’s back. He heard those words and he knew they were meant for his ears. “One day, this will all be yours.”

Cersei was petrified on the spot, as if Tywin’s eyes were pinning her to the ground. “Will I be strong and fierce like you, father?” she asked, and Jaime’s chest heaved with sorrow for all that his sister wanted and that she would never have. It was sad that he would have it instead, he who didn’t care for it, not really, not at all. Perhaps he would give it back to her, one day. You’ll be Queen, he thought. You’ll have everything and more.

“Yes,” Tywin replied, placing a hand on Cersei’s shoulder and squeezing. “You will be just as strong and fierce as me.”

 Then Tywin went ahead and did something that left Jaime confused; he pulled Cersei in for a hug, a fierce embrace. (He could almost feel his father’s arms around him, knowing it was him who was supposed to be in Cersei’s place. It was him his father was embracing, it was him his father was comforting. And Cersei must have been aware of that too, because when their eyes met he saw in them all the rage of the world.)

 

*

 

It hadn’t been a long ceremony; the septon had said the words that were supposed to lead Joanna through the fog and into the light, to the Mother’s side; they had burned candles and prayed, kneeling before the statue in a sign of reverie and respect for the departing soul. When all was said and done, they had returned to the castle, climbing up the long, narrow staircase through the bowels of the Rock and back into the light. Cersei had disappeared almost immediately, leaving Jaime in _her_ clothes, with _her_ handmaids rushing to his side and asking him if he would like a warm bath. He had swatted them all away, heading for his quarters instead. Once the door had been safely closed behind him he had slid off the dress hastily, throwing it aside with vehemence, sighing in relief as soon as his skin was rid of the tickling silks.

He had gotten dressed as quickly as he could, putting on breeches and a white blouse, so similar to the clothes Cersei had run off in. And run he did, too, across the castle, through the yard. He knew where he would find her, and he didn’t halt when the guards inquired him on his intentions. He ran fast, ran until he was out of breath and his feet ached. He ran through the gates sliding through the sentinels standing guard before the main gate. He ran down the path that led to Lannisport, alone and never fearing being followed – they had done this before. It was safe.

(Wherever Cersei was would be safe enough for him, and wherever Jaime was would be safe enough for Cersei.)

When he halted he thought he would drop dead, the sun beating furiously on his golden hair, the heat making it hard for him to catch his breath. He crouched down and tried to regain composure, narrowing his eyes and scanning the small sandy creek until he saw her, by the sea, and even from a distance she was him and he was her.  When she had run away he hadn’t had a doubt that he would follow her, find her, listen to her rage about things – he didn’t know what, but whatever she wanted to rage about, he was ready to welcome it onto his shoulders, bear the weight with her and show her that the world was not bad, that she was too young to be sad. He was too young, as well, but he knew he had to grow up. _The future of House Lannister_ , Tywin had said. That had sounded like such a burden for a child of eight years old.

The sand was warm, sneaking into his shoes, and the waves crashing against the shore were a much better sight from the Rock than they were here; but he couldn’t deny the peace that seemed to surround them; a peace that was not in his sister and not in him. They had both lost today: lost a mother, lost themselves in a sea of a different kind. Expectations and fate were waiting for them both, and they couldn’t be more different. _What a cruel jape of destiny to make our futures so different when we are so similar._ Cersei could be a knight; she could be the greatest knight of them all. Or maybe Jaime could be king, instead of the young dragon. And they could marry, Jaime and Cersei, and sit side by side on the iron throne. They would wear golden crowns and red rubies over their golden hair, and they would be remembered as the Golden King and the Golden Queen. They could become a legend, a tale that would be told long after their death.

They could win and conquer and rule. There was nothing he couldn’t think of managing with his sister by his side. It was a scary thought, which grew scarier at the thought of leaving her. What would his life be once she was married? Once he was a knight? Where would he go without her?

He sat down on the sand beside her, and Cersei barely looked up.

“What do I get?” she asked.

“You get me.” 

**Author's Note:**

> It is my firm belief that whatever physical curiosity and experimenting Jaime and Cersei did when they were children was just that, curiosity. It wasn’t until Joanna’s death that the co-dependency truly began, in a way to cope with each other’s pain and save the other the same way they could not save Joanna. Brotherly love turned to romantic love eventually, but Jaime and Cersei were first and foremost brother and sister. Also, I really feel GRRM’s pain when he says it’s not easy to write the thoughts of an 8 year old: it’s a pain in the arse.


End file.
